Being Frank: Composing "Shining Brow"

p/c: Karen Pearson

In 1989 I  began composing Shining Brow, an opera in two acts and a prologue about architect Frank Lloyd Wright. It explored the intersection of Life and Art, self-actuation and selfishness. At the time,  I asked my librettist to make this conundrum one of Wright's foremost concerns. Consequently, our Man asks a question that the actual One may never have asked himself: “Can a man be a faithful husband and father and still remain true to his art?”

My librettist Paul Muldoon was born in 1951 in County Armagh, Northern Ireland, and educated in Armagh and at the Queen's University of Belfast. The Times Literary Supplement described him as “the most significant English-language poet born since the Second World War.” From 1973 to 1986, he worked in Belfast as a radio and television producer for the BBC. Since 1987, he has lived in the States.

Robert Orth and Brenda Harris as Wright and Mamah Cheney in a concert performance by the Buffalo Philahrmonic released by Naxos. p/c: Chris Lyons

I met Paul at the Saratoga Springs artist retreat Yaddo during summer 1988. He was brilliant, ambitious, quick to skewer pretension, and impatient with mediocrity. Already it was obvious that he had every intention of becoming a celebrity poet. His hair back then looked as though it were trying to escape. He did not speak English; he produced it. You could practically hear him listening to himself as he talked. Paul was and is a virtuoso performer of his own poetry. He could read a list of names, or ingredients, and, through line readings alone, move an audience in any direction he pleased. 

In summer 1989 I received a call on one of the MacDowell Colony pay phones from conductor and artistic director of the Madison Opera Roland Johnson asking whether I might consider composing an opera about Wright. Paul was reading the newspaper a few feet away. Without thinking, I leaned out of the booth and quipped, “Say, Paul, do you want to write an opera?” A beat later, he replied, “Sure.”

When Paul and I began Brow, we first read everything we could lay hands on about Wright. We reconvened a few months later to co-author at Paul's home in Amherst, Massachusetts a filmic treatment consisting of a dozen pages describing what would happen in each scene. 

I then determined how long each scene (and each section of each scene) would last, and the sort of musical form I would use to underpin the action of that scene. Giving the outline to Paul, I asked him to create a number of core images and literary motifs that I could then graft to musical ideas, along with some “parallel” poems for related characters, so that when I shared their music, the words would be easier to adapt. At one point I needed a straightforward hymn, and he responded by creating his beautiful Goethe gloss, Hymn to Nature.

Carolann Page, creator of the role of Mamah Cheney.

Over the course of eight weeks that winter at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, I composed the music for the first act. I wrote the most important sections first, beginning with the last three minutes; then the music that would be associated with the four or five most important dramatic spots (what I call the “emotional nuclear reactors”) in the act; after that, I wrote the connective sections, which could and should be the least musically interesting. Each character existed in a “home” key: Wright in B-flat major; Mamah in E major; Edwin and Sullivan in A minor; Catherine in C major. The lovers’ keys were associated, of course, by the tritone, the “forbidden” interval, and the harmonic fulcrum on which modulation depends.

The most affecting, emotionally expressive tool in an opera composer’s kit is the ability to modulate. Aside from being crucial to maintaining large formal structures, it unlocks “gateways” to new emotional states and signals emotional evolution. I did not really learn how to modulate fluidly until I composed Brow, each of whose characters needed to interact with one another harmonically. I have used the modulatory practices used by Richard Strauss and Richard Wagner in their operas ever since I realized just how eloquent they really are, no matter what the surface style of the piece.

When composing opera, my compositional process has changed little since the early 80s. I retype and reformat the libretto to reflect the underlying musical form in which it will be carried, storyboard it on the wall, and illuminate it with various colored pens and pencils—say, red for one character, blue for another, orange for another; musical / poetic themes and motives that I want to “track” also get colors. Standing before the entire opera tacked up on the wall and dreaming on its entirety is as close as I’m likely ever get to understanding how a painter must feel working on a mural. A real sense of the pallet of ideas at hand is literally rendered in the colors arrayed on the storyboard.

Kevin Kees as Wright in the "Fallingwater Brow."

Once the entire opera is “on the wall” I decide what the most important dramatic moments (the “emotional nuclear reactors”) are in each scene; I specify what the climactic moment of the opera is, work downwards in triage fashion to the least important moment. I do not compose “from left to right.” I compose the music for the most important half dozen moments in the opera first. The music for the rest of the piece then spreads outwards from these key moments like concentric ripples.

Paul and I accepted an invitation from Richard (Dick) Carney, Wright protégé and then managing trustee of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, to stay at Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Arizona, for a few days. After lunch with members of the Fellowship (during which Wright’s recorded lunchtime conversation from decades previous played on a boom box), Paul and I settled into the little house Wright built for his daughter. The sun set as we traded impressions and prepared for a formal dinner at which I sat beside architect and Wright protégé Wes Peters, with whom I had a long, intense conversation about Wright’s relationship with Olgivanna. “Was Mamah Cheney the love of his life?” I asked Wes. “She must have been,” he replied, “but I can only say that after her death, for the rest of his life, he never allowed her to be discussed in his presence.”

After dinner, Dick and I took a long walk in the desert and discussed the sort of opera I intended to compose. A fatherly bear of a man, he gestured to me to sit down on a boulder with him. Sighing, he said, “Well, Daron, I don’t think any of us here want you to compose a dishonest piece. Mr. Wright could be a bastard. Promise me you’ll try to convey his essential ‘greatness’ along with the rest.” I didn’t tell Dick that anybody who sings is rendered sympathetic. Instead, I shook his hand. “A promise, Dick.” He picked up some dirt and threw it. “Fine. Come and stay with us as long as you want to. Soak up the feel of the place. Make Mister Wright sing. I promise you that we’ll not stand in your way.”

Daron Hagen and Stephen Wadsworth at the premiere of "Amelia" by Seattle Opera in 2010. (Photo: Alan Alabastro)

Daron Hagen and Stephen Wadsworth at the premiere of "Amelia" by Seattle Opera in 2010. p/c: Alan Alabastro

Shortly before Christmas, I finished the vocal score of the first act. I needed a “green light” from the Madison Opera board before beginning the second. The next step was to present it to the commissioners in Madison.

“Just two hours ago,” President Bush began, “allied air forces began an attack on military targets in Iraq and Kuwait. These attacks continue as I speak. Ground forces are not engaged.” It was 16 January. The United States had just invaded Iraq. In a huge rehearsal hall customarily used for symphony rehearsals, halfway through playing and singing the first act of Brow for the members of the Taliesin Fellowship and the board of Madison Opera, conductor Roland Johnson asked me to stop at 5:45 so that we could all gather around a portable radio to listen to our President address the nation. “Tonight, as our forces fight, they and their families are in our prayers.”

"Shall we continue this another time?” I asked Ann Stanke. She looked to Dick, who asked me, “Do you have a problem with moving ahead with this presentation?” It seemed absurd to me, under the circumstances, but I needed the money, and would not get paid unless, by pulling off this presentation, I fulfilled the terms of the commissioning contract. “No,” I lied, resuming my seat at the piano and picking up where I had left off.

Dick then pledged that the Fellowship would support my creation of the opera, and Roland “green lit” my moving on to the second act. It was my first taste, at twenty-nine, of what the life of a viable opera composer might be like, and I relished it.

The cast and production team of Urban Arias’ chamber version, “Usonian Brow” in Washington, DC in 2017.

I spent some time at Taliesin, in Spring Green. Edgar Tafel, the best known of Wright’s disciples, decided that he was going to see to it personally that I experienced what it was like “really to live in a Wright House—to duck when you pass through doorways, discover your feet hanging over the bottom of the bed at night, feel the rooms flowing from one to the next in the dark.” He conjured for me the poetry that Wright seems to have been able to spin for clients.  His impersonations of Wright’s speaking voice were—aside from being incredibly funny—crucial to shaping my vocal characterization—particularly Wright’s stilted line readings, and what David Diamond, in a letter to me, described as “…the pontification, the affected dress-ugh-y, like Stieglitz.”

My friend photographer Pedro Guerrero’s reminiscences of Wright’s gentler moments also helped me to firm up the conviction that part of his appeal must have been the ability to project immense vulnerability in private. Dick Carney's descriptions of the tenderness that Wright could display also informed my decision to create the gentle music that underpins Wright’s soliloquies. Dick was a humane and generous man. My treasured former pupil and copyist Christopher Hume had a degenerative spinal condition that required his settling in a town with excellent medical facilities. I suggested Madison. I asked Dick to look out for Chris. He took him under his wing. They remained close for the rest of their lives.

Hagen and librettist Paul Muldoon attend the Arizona Opera revival in 2019. p/c: Stephanie Weiss

The following autumn, in a tiny efficiency apartment at the corner of Amsterdam and 74th Street just off Verdi Square on Manhattan's Upper West Side, over the course of a few months, I wrote in one long delicious stretch the second act. Darynn Zimmer, the soprano who years later recorded the role of Mona in Bandanna under my baton for Albany records, was kind enough to sing through the role of Mamah for me as I composed it.

Like baseball pitchers, most composers have rituals. Mine consisted then of making my world very small and simple when I was writing so that I could keep all of the various motives and ideas suspended in my mind. My scrupulously maintained routine began with morning coffee and a chocolate chip scone from the Korean Market just below my apartment at 303 Amsterdam while reading the New York Times seated on a particular bench in Strawberry Fields. While composing—for exactly four hours by the stopwatch—I drank two bottles of San Pellegrino. Then I would run around the Central Park reservoir (twice: 3.2 miles), and then drink a bottle of San Pellegrino afterwards while walking home. I’d devour two slices of Freddy and Pepper’s pizza (an excellent joint in the basement which is still in business) sitting in Verdi Square, and then spend the evening making a fair copy of the sketches I had made during the day.

Robert Orth as Frank Lloyd Wright in Chicago Opera Theater's revival, directed by Kenneth Cazan.

I've written elsewhere about what it was like to consult with Leonard Bernstein while I composed parts of Brow. One example of how he “got” the musical rhetoric of the opera merits repetition, I think. During Wright’s Act 1, scene one pitch to his future mistress, I quoted the New York, New York rising fourths motive that he had first used in Trouble in Tahiti, and then in On the Town, on the word, “suburbia.” Bernstein chuckled appreciatively.  “Nice lift,” he said, “very Strauss. But you followed it up with stuff that sounds like Ned’s [Ned Rorem] little Frank O’Hara opera. Did I steal that from him for Tahiti or did he steal that from me? I can’t remember. In any event, I know you’re talking about theft by putting stolen music in his mouth, so you should come up with something else there.”

Tim Petty as Wright in the Tulsa Opera revival.

At some point, I pointed out that I had been modeling the character of Wright musically on him, and the relationship between Wright and Sullivan on him and Blitzstein. He got it: “That’s Maria. No, it’s the orchestral play-in to the first scene of Marc’s Regina,” he mused aloud. “Well, yes, I stole it from Marc.” Silence. Sudden grin: “But he stole it from Aaron!”

The Madison Opera had asked me to suggest a stage director for Brow. I asked Bernstein to suggest one. He suggested Stephen Wadsworth, with whom he had just written an opera called A Quiet Place.

The Fallingwater premeire by Opera Festival of Pittsburgh in 2013.

“I’ve written an opera about Frank Lloyd Wright,” I told Stephen on the phone. “I’m looking for someone to bring it to life on the stage. Lenny says that you’re that person. Would you like to come over for coffee and talk about it?” I knew that would get his attention.

That April, we sat cross-legged on the floor of my tiny studio more or less under the piano and in front of the six linear feet of opera scores on the bookshelves and began sounding one another out by pulling scores at random from the shelf and discussing them.

It helped that we both had been compelled to figure out how to work with Bernstein—Stephen as collaborator, me as pupil. Stephen could survive (even enjoy) Bernstein's intellectual death marches; I thrived on his musical pop quizzes. We shared an appetite for conversations that functioned on multiple levels.

Michael Sokol as Wright in the 1993 Madison Opera production.

Michael Sokol as Wright in the 1993 Madison Opera production.

I know now that our first meeting was typical of Stephen’s special way with everyone—warm, clever, completely at ease, and intellectually competitive. His probing eyes habitually sought out mine; his compassionate face was extraordinarily expressive. His long fingers moved restlessly when he spoke. I found charming his ability to italicize what he was saying by giving you a hard, quick stare, and then releasing you. He was fun.

At first, it was the confidence and maturity of his opinions as we stuck our thumbs into scores and played “what’s the most important moment in this scene” that impressed me most. In time, as we grew to know one another better, I realized that what I had interpreted as competitiveness was instead an urgent desire to understand: if an idea intrigued him, he reflexively craved an explanation.

The talents that have served him so well in his illustrious career were already in full play as, over the course of six very long work sessions at the apartment in the Village he shared with baritone Kurt Ollmann, I played and sang through Brow’s score. I was defensive, and needed to be “sold” on every one of the dozen or so alterations to words and music (I had to my mind “finished” the score months previously) that he suggested. I’m not certain now why I fought him so hard—especially since I knew even then that his criticisms were always spot on. Possibly, it was because I wanted to see just how right he thought he was.

For the workshop, the cast and company of Brow gathered at the Bernstein family’s apartment at the Dakota to give for Madison Opera’s donors and staff a workshop performance (piano and two dozen singers) of the complete score. Ann Stanke, The company's founde and the driving force behind the commission, worked the room as Roland powwowed with the singers.

Daron and Arizona Opera revival director Chas Rader Shieber in 1993. p/c: Stephanie Weiss

At my suggestion, the company had capitalized upon the New York press’ interest in visiting the apartment one more time to fill the room with eyes and ears (particularly the national press) that might not otherwise have had any interest in a commission, however laudable, of an unknown composer by a small Midwestern company.

The boundary between life and death blurred in a familiar—even comforting—fashion as I listened to the music I had provided for the character of Wright—consciously referring as it did to Bernstein’s music at key points—was performed in Bernstein’s home. It had been impossible, strolling around Taliesin with Dick (like me, an insomniac) in the wee hours, not to feel Wright’s presence. It had been impossible at Yaddo not to feel the Trask family’s. It had been impossible to walk through the Common Room at the Curtis Institute as a student without feeling the benevolent spirit of Mary Louise Curtis Bok. And it still felt, at the Dakota, as though Bernstein slouched still in the chair in the den, sipping a scotch, pulling on his plastic cigarette holder, growling one of the last things he said to me: “Play and sing that part again, baby—the part that sounds like Marc.”

Everyone involved with the April 1993 opening night of Brow knew that it was going to be a success. 25 years and 7 operas later, I now am acutely aware of how rare that is. That night, at “the rail” of the house, behind the audience, where authors traditionally are allowed to pace, fret, enjoy, and suffer, performances of their work, with Stephen, as the tragic ending of Madison Opera’s première production unfolded.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s final aria. Arizona Opera 2019 revival.

Stephen said, “Look!” “Eh?” I said. “Look at them,” he said, sweeping a hand over the audience, who were experiencing the last few minutes of the opera. “They’re all weeping.”

“Yes, that’s where we want them,” I said. “No,” he said. “That’s where they want to be. You did it. I did it. Paul did it. The performers did it. Communion. We all did it. Together.”

The next morning a telegram from Ned arrived at my hotel, saying, “I always said that you would arrive at twenty.” The reviews were strong, and the consensus was that my career had begun.

"Can a man be a faithful husband and father and still be true to his Art?” In the years since I've come to my own conclusion about the Life vs Art paradigm. Art is to my Life as the MacGuffin is to a Hitchcock movie. While I have become music, my family is my Life. So much so, that I've experienced a parting of ways with most of my colleagues who’ve concluded otherwise. Perhaps Wright came to that conclusion sometime after the point at which our opera left him, pledging to rebuild Taliesin in Mamah Cheney’s memory. Perhaps not. In the long run, it shall probably only have mattered  to the people he loved and who loved him. 

First published in the Huffington Post on 8 August 2016. Read it there by clicking here.

Louis Krasner and the Second Viennese School

Summer 1985, DH at Tanglewood with Leon Kirchner and Adrienne and Louis Krasner following the premiere (coached by Louis and dedicated by me to him) of my revised String Quartet No. 1 by a fellowship quartet. It was a great honor to work with Kirchner & Louis that summer, and to eagerly take in all the oral history Louis had to offer about Berg, Schoenberg, and Webern.

Louis Krasner was the shortest person in the room, but he undoubtedly cast by far the longest shadow. The summer’s fellowship composers (of which I was one during summer 1985) arrayed themselves easily, thoughtlessly, like bolts of cloth, with the bodily flexibility available only to the young, over, and around sticks of furniture in the living room at Seranak—onetime home of Serge and Natalia Koussevitzky, and by that time, serving as a venue for the Tanglewood Festival. We were gathered for an oral history lesson (one he’d clearly presented before and would present again) from the person who had premiered not only Alban Berg’s, but also Arnold Schoenberg’s monumental violin concertos—a man not only present but literally instrumental in bringing about their existence.

Observing as a child that my parents customarily inscribed the date and place that they had acquired books on the title page, I had long followed suit; so, I knew that the Universal study score of the Berg concerto I was holding had been purchased at Patelson’s (lamented emporium behind Carnegie Hall) on 18 April 1983, after a lesson with Lukas Foss, whose astonishment that I did not yet know the piece (there certainly was a lot that I didn’t know then that I know now—and I have learned the obvious fact that the more you know the less you know) transformed in a beat to wild enthusiasm and joy as he sat down without a score in front of him and played for me at the piano the climactic moment—the hochpunkt at measure 125 of the second movement—singing in his own octave the solo violin part. 

Nobody had a cell phone back then, and I don’t think that it would have occurred to any one of us to bring a tape recorder. We were surrounded by history: Leon Kirchner was our teacher; Maurice Abravanel perambulated and dispensed wisdom every afternoon; John Adams listened to our music one afternoon before attending a rehearsal of his brand new Harmonielehre; Bernstein was due in a week or two and would listen to our music and spend the evening in this same room, cross-legged on the floor, talking about Art and the Bomb. Knowing that I was a witness to something important I pulled a ballpoint pen out and began to transcribe Louis’ words; the only paper at hand was my study score, so I wrote on that.

“The Schoenberg concerto is certainly the equal of the Berg,” he began. “Though not as popular, even if it takes a hundred years, it will become the pride of violinists. The Berg, sentimental, with a requiem story, had everything going for it. The Schoenberg, when Stokowski finally programmed it, was rejected twice before being accepted. There was no fee involved; Stoki paid me out of his own pocket.” 

“Stoki,” he continued, “was the ‘Glamorous One,’ but he forced the check on me and made the subsequent performances possible of the Berg and Schoenberg concertos in the States. People should know that. Stoki was really the first performance of the Berg in the States—before Koussy. Mitropoulos was one of the greatest proponents of contemporary music. He would sleep for only four hours a night. He got his reward—by dying on the podium at La Scala.”

 I looked around. It was plain that we all knew that we were hearing something special. Louis had known Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg. He had been there. “These three men were complicated, but the period in which they lived was the fermentation of world calamity—in a way, we are still in that time. Webern was gentle, humble, frail (like Bartok)—very intense.  About Webern all you could see were suspicious, blazing eyes. Devoted to his family—religious, with a family stretching back to the 1500s. I went with Webern from Vienna to Barcelona at a time when Berg died—December of 1936—I was in New York and involved with a new string quartet. I withdrew in order to play the Berg for the ISCM in Barcelona. I dropped everything and went to Vienna. Webern came and was to conduct it but withdrew. No one knew it but him. I said ‘let me go’ to Webern and they said, ‘No! He’s in too emotional a state’.”

“Finally, I went to him and played through it with him. He finally relented. One ticket to Barcelona went through Germany. In Munich we got off the train and he bought me a beer. Back on the train he said, ‘so has anybody harmed you?’ He was so naive. And of course, we talked about it for the rest of the night after we’d gotten to Switzerland.”

At this point, he read a statement of Arnold Schoenberg, which he had translated himself: “We believed with sacrificial readiness in ideals once perceived and we never would/could have left these. Or given them up. Even if one had succeeded in misleading us. One must always think of us as Webern, Schoenberg, and Berg together.”

Putting the paper down, Krasner continued in his own words, “Schoenberg had great reservations about Webern as he had been taken in by the Nazis. In 1938, just before the war, I got back to the US from Vienna; I was told that Schoenberg was looking for me. Schoenberg had written an effusive dedication to Webern and I lied when asked whether Webern had been taken in by the Nazis. Steuerman and Schoenberg knew I was lying, but I am glad that I lied…. The terrible torment one can suffer in such a situation—the political situation was terrible, the Fascists wanted to overthrow (putsch) the Socialists. The city of Vienna (Socialists) supported Webern-s music. These Socialists were not Communists. And all his friends—Jews, Gentiles alike—were still there. His daughters’ husbands were both high-ranking Nazis…. Think of the suffering of this sensitive man being torn between the supporters of his music and his family.”

“I saw Webern several times after that and once I was playing the Schoenberg concerto and the 4 o’clock broadcast where the prime minister announced the German invasion of Austria and Austria’s capitulation. He said, ‘Get out as fast as you can!’ and I barely escaped.”

“After the war, I went back to Schoenberg’s house in Vienna and heard about Webern’s life during the war. I was told about the self-torture and guilt he went through. He saw that it wasn’t like that Munich restaurant at all. In ’37, the Vienna Philharmonic was already [filled with] undercover Nazis. Klemperer programmed Berg and many refused to play. The concert with Klemperer came off because Rosé came and played concertmaster. As soon as it was over they left the stage, leaving me, Klemperer, and Rosé alone on stage. Webern was in this position during the war.”

“Right after the Anschluss these men came with their armbands to rehearsals. All this Webern witnessed. Schoenberg’s son told me this—and his guilt (he hadn’t done anything) was terrible. When the Russians came into the city, Webern fled to Salzburg. Webern stepped out to light a cigarette during curfew and was shot…. Schoenberg’s son said that it was ‘suicide by a third hand.’ I see in that, for Webern, it was his redemption—when he was able to die by a bullet from the other side, he was freed.”

“Webern did not go to Barcelona, Scherchen did. In London Webern did a very good job with me on the BBC who gave him as much rehearsal time as he needed. The three of them didn’t have a jealousy—I wish there were a better word—but when I got Schoenberg’s concerto he said, ‘This is no Berg concerto; this is much more difficult!’ I asked Webern when he would write a violin concerto but he didn’t get to it. I found a letter six years ago from Webern to me where he suggested beginning a solo violin sonata (which I had suggested). Part of my strength with these men was that I was not filled with awe and trepidation of them. I was too stupid to know better. So I said to Webern will you write me a solo piece?”

“So, somewhere in Webern’s papers there may exist a solo sonata.”

Earning the Tune

Granted, melody is but one of the strands that make up musical expression; further, what constitutes a beautiful, or even “memorable” tune, is in the ear of the beholder. Factor in that tastes change: we’re always swinging back and forth, pendulum-like, generation to generation, from romanticism to modernism, like drunks sobering up after a binge, staying sober, and relapsing. After Wagner’s hyper-emotional Tristan und Isolde comes Debussy’s emotionally cool Pelléas et Mélisande where most of the frank emotionalism (summoned up by his utilization of all the music elements at his disposal—harmonic and melodic tension and release, dynamics, texture) is in the orchestra and, in an opera about love, “Je t’aime” is sung as though spoken, and in silence.

I recall for two reasons a composition seminar at Juilliard in fall 1985 at which I presented my String Quartet No. 1. Present were our teachers, Milton Babbitt, Elliott Carter, Vincent Persichetti, and David Diamond, as well as about twenty fellow graduate composition students. I remember it primarily because Diamond chewed me out afterwards for “trivializing my work.” I was genuinely surprised by the admonition at the time because I had trusted that the work’s sturdy craftsmanship would speak for itself; that my breezy, self-assured presentation of my musical analysis (I was proud of the fact that every note could be justified both through serial and tonal procedures) would be interpreted as simply unpretentious, and not anti-intellectual. I’m afraid that I never quite embraced David’s advice to “be more respectful of the excellence of your own work in public.”

The second takeaway I recall because it came from an unexpected source. Milton had raised only one point during the question-and-answer portion of the presentation: he had observed that, on the chalkboard behind me, I had mislabeled one of the pitches in my tone row. Chuckling, I had taken no offense, but rather had simply made the correction and sallied into my analysis. Observing my dressing down by the furious Diamond, he came up to me and said, “You know, Daron, it seems to me you pay mightily for that soaring tune in the finale. Maybe ask yourself why.”

The signal I was probably trying to send all those years ago in that seminar was that talent can and should present itself as “easy.” As an upper-class socialite once asked me in a green room, “Why else would we all call what you musicians do ‘playing’?” Of course, I was not giving our shared labor the respect it deserved, so David was correct. But Milton’s point is the one that stays with me now that age and the years have made David’s advice moot.

The “soaring tune” to which Milton referred had been the third, most “ironed-out” version of the rondo’s fugue subject. I had intended that it trigger something close to what Milton had felt. I had felt it when I wrote it, and I trusted myself enough to commit to it. So there it was, a big wet Dionysian kiss in the middle of my highbrow Apollonian string quartet. Milton knew that it took “courage” to share a good tune, and that the first thing that someone looking to put you in your place does is to call it derivative. Why do I feel even now as though tunes have to be “earned?” Raised Lutheran—and, like many composers of my generation, taught to temper tunes with just enough “abstract” wrong notes to keep them from really taking off—I’ve always wrestled with the “unearned” bliss of unabashed, emotionally-frank lyricism. Early on, during the 90s, a New York Times critic wrote of my first opera that I had “a gift for big, sweeping tunes;” thirty years later, another Times critic thought that my latest opera contained “too much lyricism.”  Right.

I thanked Milton for the observation and sort of forgot about the advice that had followed. But, watching my son row with his mates in a shell on the Hudson in the driving rain from the safety of my car this morning, I was reminded that even the bliss of rowing at dawn on the Hudson on a perfect day has got to be earned by also putting out when the weather is inclement.

Back in the day, Ned Rorem’s primly modernist Air Music (a terrific piece in which “there’s not a tune you can hum-bum-bum-be-dum”) won a Pulitzer, while his Sunday Morning (closer to his heart, more effusively melodic) garnered more love than respect. Some composers might say that it takes more courage to dish out a “big tune” with “soaring horn calls” than it does to craft honorable, abstract pieces just tuneful enough not to rile anyone up. After all, the old conventional wisdom runs, pieces with “good tunes” belong on pops concerts. A highly-tuneful work on a major orchestra’s subscription season can provoke conductorial winks to the audience and players. Diamond accused me of “not enough self-criticism” when what he meant was that I shouldn’t indulge in writing memorable tunes. In Tim Robbins’ Cradle Will Rock gloss, John Cusak, portraying Nelson Rockefeller (in this scenario, the upper class baddie), pours money into abstract art with Sarandon (as the amoral art dealer Sarfatti) on his arm because Rubén Blades’ Rivera (the dangerous artist moving between classes) makes art that riles up working class folks. Cue the Blitzstein. Next on our show: was Modernism a State Department / CIA Psy-Op? I enjoy the off the rails nature of that sort of read, whether it is true or not.

So what’s a tune if you denature it? Parlando. Gian Carlo Menotti pointed out to me once that “recitative and parlando are just foreplay.”  I recall attending a performance of Jack Beeson’s opera My Heart’s in the Highlands and growing steadily more irritated that every time he was about to really break out into a memorable tune he cut himself short. Laughing, Bernstein described this affliction as “Tuneus Interruptus.” When Burt Bacharach died a few weeks ago, I recalled Babbitt’s advice to “ask myself why” again. Bacharach’s tunes, seemingly bubble-gummy, are actually tricky to sing; it is the composer’s struggle to be both catchy and smart that gives them their zest. The quip that Peter Shaffer puts into Emperor Joseph II’s mouth in Amadeus that there are “too many notes” shifted in the 20th century to something more insidious: now one runs the risk of putting in “too many pretty notes.” (Even more recently, the vogue is to slam “too much functional harmony.” What is the phrase? In lean times the rich are overweight; in fat times they are lean?

Howard Pollack’s biography of Samuel Barber describes beautifully—and rightly—the upper-class Main Line Philadelphia society into which he was born. Ned, born into a middle-class Chicago family, composed increasingly modernist music as he aged. Like Ned, I was born into the middle-American middle-class. Unlike Ned, I found the acquisition of a Mid-Atlantic compositional accent (the whole “abstract” thing where textures and colors take the place of tunes so that other, less confrontational, factors can come to the fore) and the role of arriviste beside the point, as I was steadfastly committed to the pursuit of emotional nakedness, regardless of … “taste.” The chimera of what constitutes “good taste” is often used to beat down perceived competitors—as if making art is a contest! “Ladies and gentlemen, in this corner, the boxer from Tin Pan Alley; in the other, the pugilist from Lincoln Center.”

An artist who labors to conceal his craft is, when successful, often described as an “effortless” melodist and derided as a “tunesmith” rather than as a composer. A “tunesmith” is a tradesman; a composer is an artist. In The Agony and the Ecstacy, novelist Irving Stone has testy Pope Julius shout up to Michelangelo, “When will you make an end?” The maestro snarls back, “When I am finished.” Crawford’s contempt as the dissolute patroness Helen for Garfield’s vulgar “striver” virtuoso violinist Paul in Humoresque, for all the delicious camp with which it is presented, is adroitly mixed by someone who had been around and seen a thing or two (playwrite Clifford Odets) with envy, self-loathing and lust. Artists move freely through classes, it is true; but we’re still servants at play; we are meant never, ever to forget who owns the house, and the way to the kitchen door. We’re still talking about how talent intersects with class, aren’t we, Milton? You old fox.

A digression, perhaps, but it is important to mention that it isn’t just “melody” that comes in for the class-related slap down. I recall the casual contempt with which a colleague whose cultural reference points (and social aspirations) were shaped by their years at Harvard and Columbia dismissed the first movement of my Koto Concerto. Why? Because, for them, “serious” meant “saturating the chromatic” and I had, as a compositional challenge, based it entirely on a simple pentatonic pitch group. The brilliant composer David Rakowski has written hilariously about the various other self-imposed (!) creative hang-ups of our compositional generation here.

When the American Academy gave me an Academy Award a few years ago, the citation noted that I was being honored for having “achieved my own voice.” Grateful as I was for the recognition, I admit that I was a little puzzled by the citation. Stephen Sondheim’s smart, tart lyric from Anyone Can Whistle came to mind: “What's hard is simple. / What's natural come hard.” I think my songs are harder to sing than they ought to be because I’m still —still! — after forty years, struggling to be “easier” to sing. What is in youth derided as “facile” is deemed later as “not self-critical enough.” (In need of more “wrong” notes?) Some composers have to fight to get there; others never give it a thought; but, one day, a composer ceases to care what colleagues and critics think. A mindful composer never stops caring about how the audience feels, though. Consequently, I still believe that anybody can, in fact, whistle; I believe in “peace, justice, and good tunes.”

Why? Because, in the final analysis, good tunes are the surest, most generous, most intimate way a composer has to share unconditional, unearned love with an audience. That’s why tunes move us so deeply; why they threaten some people, console others, and embarrass others. As Milton admonished me so long ago, “Maybe ask yourself why.”

And the Music Was With Him: Burt Bacharach (1928-2023)

ABC Television, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

ABC Television, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The bit was in. I had spotted bliss—far off in the distance still, but real enough to enthrall. Fifteen years old, summer of 1976, body vibrating, ablaze with youth and hormones at the kitchen table at three in the morning with the radio on listening to Ron Cuzner’s overnight jazz show on WFMR and copying parts to Together, the musical I was writing for my friends.

Cuzner introduced the six-minute-long 1971 Polydor recording to his listeners as though disclosing classified information over whisky to a fellow agent in a smoky bar near Checkpoint Charlie. I remember the words clearly: “He hails from California. (beat of silence) Marlene Dietrich (again, the silence, to let the enormously important intelligence land) is reported to have (beat) loved him. He married a glamorous movie star (beat), Angie Dickinson. But he was a student of Milhaud, and Cowell (I knew who these guys were and was impressed) who, shall we say, went off the railswith the likes of (he paused, as though about to invoke a Holy Trinity) Warwick, Jones, and Alpert. This (Cuzner’s ultimate seal of approval) very cool orchestral work describes the moment you first see (long beat) her.”

Five years earlier, my brother Kevin had brought the Columbia LP’s of Leonard Bernstein’s MASS home and I had scandalized my fellow ten-year-olds by playing “it was goddamn good” (listen to Alan Titus sing it here) in class at Linfield School to the horror of Principal Buege (pronounced “Biggy,” of course) and to the delight of my mother. (Kevin had provoked similar outrage by bringing Jesus Christ Superstar to school a year earlier.) But my mom also adored Ella Fitzgerald, Barbara Streisand, and Frank Sinatra—the exquisite Nelson Riddle arrangements of the Cole Porter songbook especially. I was immersed in the Beatles songbook, of course; I had read Twilight of the Gods, Wilfred Mellers’ terrific book about their songs, the previous summer. My brothers and I had wept in 1970 when the announcer introduced the first local broadcast of The Long and Winding Road on WOKY by revealing that the Beatles had decided to split up.

Intuiting that something interesting was about to happen, I slipped a cassette in to tape it, missing the first few bars. I would listen to that recording of And the People Were With Her a hundred times that summer. I still have it.

My literature teacher, Diane Doerfler, knew that the one thing I was sure I was going to do was leave Wisconsin for the coast at the very first opportunity. Which coast was very much up in the air. My father favored the west coast: he recorded movie soundtracks by way of a jack he had installed on the back of our television. I’d spent a lot of time listening to dozens of them—particularly to Elmer Bernstein’s majestic Great Escape, Magnificent Seven, and To Kill a Mockingbird. Doerfler was in favor of the east coast: she had tossed me a copy (which I still have) of John Cheever’s collected short stories about life in the Hudson Valley and quipped, “Here. Read these. They will help.” (They did. Doerf was right; after decades in Manhattan, I now live in the Hudson Valley.)

From the moment that And the People Were With Her (listen here as you read this piece) ended, my “Killer B’s” for the rest of summer 1975 became Beatles, Bernstein, and Bacharach and the west coast became a real contender. John Williams’ pealing orchestral main title to Star Wars in summer 1978 hit me like a hammer, and I was certain — according to my diaries — that I would move to Los Angeles and start work as an orchestrator, perhaps even graduate in time to scoring. The decision was made when mother sent my orchestral Suite for a Lonely City to Helen Coates and in return received a letter — a sort of unexpected musical golden ticket — from Leonard Bernstein which she would open a few feet away from where I was sitting. East it was.

In a few months, Kevin would put Britten’s Billy Budd on the record player, and my future as an opera composer would be set: Bacharach was supplanted by Britten. By the time I graduated high school, the earthy authenticity of Bartok supplanted the Beatles. College in Madison brought Homer Lambrecht’s influence; he introduced me to the Italianate suavity of Berio, and my musical trinity became Berio, Britten, and Bernstein. When I finally landed at Curtis, Lukas Foss got me into Stockhausen — a needed antidote to the polishing and professionalizing I was receiving in my lessons with Ned Rorem — and my world was turned inside out. I dedicated myself to Beethoven, Brahms, and Bach as far as the school and my peers were concerned — heaven knows I had enough to learn about that repertoire! — and holed up at the Free Library with Stockhausen and the eastern bloc modernists in the afternoons. Though I toyed with a career in LA during summer 1988, I ended up moving to Europe instead, returning to New York City for good in 1990.

Being a pianist and devotee of the American Songbook helps one to truly credit the subversive power of Bacharach’s music. Gershwin, Arlen, Kern, Rogers, Porter — the lot of them — were only a few years past. Like Bernstein, Bacharach’s chord choices could be deliciously “classical” (I hear the harmonic choices of Bill Evans), with modulations, shifting meters and phrase lengths. Some of his bridges (my favorite is the wandering and wonderful, take-that-Kern-and-Arlen bridge to A House is Not a Home — listen here) are pure bliss. Like Stephen Sondheim and Bernstein, his tunes could be tricky. But during his Warwick-Alpert years, I sense that something in him led him to craft surprisingly memorable (though, again, deceptively simple yet more than quirky and smart, I’d say inspired) tunes.

I have read that Bacharach will be remembered compositionally as a transitional figure bridging the methods perfected by the 50s Brill Building bunch and rock and roll. Or maybe as the American Michel Legrand. Maybe, but I think that takeaway unfairly diminishes his accomplishment. He was a master of instrumental MOR. (“Middle-of-the-road,” a commercial radio format that includes “easy listening” and can even cover cool genres such as Shibuya-kei and show tunes and not so cool ones like Countrypolitan.) MOR makes musical snobs crazy—particularly when a gifted composer writes it. I love that. It’s subversive, and musical chauvinists just don’t get it.

Bacharach brilliantly subverted commercial music clichés and practices by marrying them (thereby freshening classical tropes and supercharging pop music tropes) to classical chops and compositional procedures not to accompany the dissipation of the valium and martini hazed Greatest Generation, but to underline their societal disillusionment. When James Coburn steps into William Daniels’ den (watch it here) in The President’s Analyst (1967) and Daniels’ character (a gun-toting “liberal”) flicks a switch, filling the room with “total sound,” the music supplied by Lalo Schifrin captured the essence of what I have described elsewhere as that which is “heard in the waiting room of a dentist’s office while awaiting a root canal.” It’s MOR, it’s the seamy underside of the American Dream, and it is glorious.

When Cory, a 35 year old arbitrageur who works at the World Trade Center, arrives and lets rip with a big aria in my operafilm 9/10: Love Before the Fall, he’s characterized by the sort of virile Mike Post television theme (here, or here, or here) from the 70s-90s he’d have grown up with—who knows, maybe watching LA Law as a teenager was what inspired him to become a lawyer! When Bibi, a 21-year-old singer brought up in Los Angeles, remembers her childhood there, she swings into music that could have been lifted wholesale from Nikki (listen here). MOR had served as the background music to their suburban childhoods as much as shag carpeting had comforted their bare feet in the den—one on the east coast, the other on the west. It is my honor to characterize them with the music with which they would have identified. Editing the film, I’ve watched again and again (as only one strapped to a moviola must) as people in the room reacted with everything from delight to contempt to these musical moments, depending on who they think they are or what they think music ought to be.

Bacharach was who he was, and his honor — whether it be in South American Getaway (listen here, where he out swingles the Swingle Singers and puts a pin in Berio’s magnificent Sinfonia), or Pacific Coast Highway (listen here, from 1968) in which he captures the dread-filled determination to be carefree that I still picked up on while driving on it during the 90s to Stinson Beach — was to contextualize his time.

To me, though, the most incorruptible facet of Bacharach’s compositional gift remains the gleaming horizontality of his melodies from which the chords seem to hang like icicles from the eaves of an irregular roofline. Hal David’s lyrics were middlebrow — another thing that made the songs easier to digest than Sondheim’s — but heartfelt and soulful. I was never crazy for the collaborations with Bayer Sager. Elvis Costello’s verse — smart, dark, and probing, was a great foil for the late Bacharach as a songwriter. Bacharach set lyrics as an art song composer would poetry (or as Elton John treats Bernie Taupin’s words, though he is liable to override the lyrics entirely for the sake of a good hook or tune) — permitting the rhythm of the unevenly proportioned lyric lines to generate melodies more like those from an art song than a popular song.

Perhaps, if he had been the sort of man who could have been contained by the eastern seaboard, he would not have toured with Dietrich, courted commercial success, or married Dickinson, or encountered his singer muse Warwick (his Leontyne?) and created I Say a Little Prayer (listen here to it as not just a love confection but as the cri de coeur of a woman whose boyfriend is in Vietnam and you get how his songs can be simultaneously winsome and wise) and a host of other great Motown-influenced gems. Maybe he would have surpassed Alec Wilder’s expectations and created a new American art song repertoire. Maybe he would have been America’s other Samuel Barber. Maybe he did. Maybe he was.

Too Much Footage

Joseph Cotten in “Too Much Johnson” (1938).

Filmed in 1938, Orson Welles’ unfinished (and unscreened) silent film Too Much Johnson was shot to serve as the film component of a staged production of William Gillette’s 1894 comedy. It was meant to be shown between acts of the play, and not to stand up as a narrative on its own. The ceiling of the Stony Creek Theatre, in Connecticut—where my own film Orson Rehearsed was screened in August 2021 and where Welles was staging a rare “out of town tryout” before moving the production to Broadway—was apparently too low to allow for its projection, and so Welles’ production debuted without film.

Evidently, there was also the matter of an attorney’s letter that Welles received from Paramount informing him that they owned the film rights. Ironically, both of Paramount’s film versions of the play are now lost. The footage for Welles’ film, shot only three years before Citizen Kane, his explosive cinematic debut, was also believed lost, but in 2008 a work print was found in a warehouse in Italy.

Members of the Wintergreen Festival Orchestra affectionately dubbed the “Tramp Orchestra.”

The original score for the film was by Paul Bowles, who published fragments of it as the suite Music for a Farce. My score builds on the array of themes and gestures that I have built up over a five year period composing scores commissioned by, and premiered by members of the Wintergreen Music Festival Orchestra (which adopted for these ongoing projects the name “The Tramp Orchestra” over the years) under the direction of Erin Freeman, artistic director of the Wintergreen Music Festival, where it has become a tradition to have a silent movie evening in a tent high up in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Previous scores that I have provided include The Tramp, City Lights, A Dog’s Life, and a score to the Barrymore classic, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Out of that process also grew the score to my “operafilm,” Orson Rehearsed, which is available on DVD and CD.

I determined not to watch the public domain footage available for download on the internet before scoring it. The result was that my sense of it grew as I scored it, from left to right. For Too Much Johnson, I crafted simultaneously the film score and a free-standing concert music work called Moviola that celebrated the traditions, concerns, techniques, aesthetic, and ebullient joy of scoring to picture. Really, it is for me something of a composer’s holiday, and I relish it. (The score to The Tramp, of course, also serves as a piano concerto, but that’s another matter, as is The Passion of Jekyll and Hyde — with which I am still tinkering—which serves as the instrumental spine of a combination live opera performance and screening.)

“Listen for a mashup at one point of “The Star Spangled Banner,” Ethel Smythe’s “March of the Women,” “Frére Jacques,” as used in the Mahler Symphony No. 1, “Three Blind Mice,” and Nino Rota’s “Godfather Waltz.”

Marc Blitzstein, author of The Cradle Will Rock, in an uncredited role in “Too Much Johnson.” (Wikipedia Public Domain image)

I flew through the Welles third, started feeling the “padding” of unnecessary extra “beats” in the second, and, upon reaching the “Cuba” footage, realized that I was going to have to take a heavier hand. I decided not to provide intertitles, as they exert a powerful influence on narrative design and structure; I had music for that. Unless one knows the play, the film will make only the sort of surreal sense that many early silents do—it’s a chase, you know? And there’s a bad guy, and a Harold Lloyd-like (very) young Joseph Cotten, Welles’ wife, his friend and producer John Houseman obviously having a ball, and an uncredited bit part for Marc Blitzstein as a Stevedore.

I have followed the lead of previous film editors who’ve taken a hand to cutting it with the important difference that I cut it to work best with music. Only the first third had been closely edited by Welles. Acutely sensitive to the death by a thousand cuts inflicted on Welles for the rest of his career, I left that third alone, of course. There were no intertitles (which Welles had planned), and alternate takes were placed back-to-back for future reference in the second third. I omitted most of the alternate takes and chose the one that I liked best in this part of the film. The final “Cuba” section of the film consisted of long, repetitive, unedited establishing takes; closeups and reaction shots were made for only the last few beats in the pond. I took a scissors as I scored the film to the last twelve minutes, cutting about ten minutes of repetitive coverage, and emulating the Chaplin and Keaton leavened with Soviet montage editing voice that Welles himself used in the first section.

p/c: Michelle Merrill

The film as I have cut it runs 48 minutes; the concert work runs 24—exactly half as long. The music? I would describe it as a nostalgic love song to the artistic world of the 1930s, disarming, affectionate, and gleefully subversive in the technical virtuosity with which it manipulates themes, allusions, history, and style. I know that my dear friend Lukas Foss would have been delighted by the fact that the more one understands how music functions, the more fun the score is to listen to. I really, really enjoy provoking snobs who feel entitled to call out what they subjectively deem cliché; those who conflate “classism” and “taste;” and those who contrive through those conflations to twist music to chauvinistic, or exclusionary effect.

Maestra Freeman and the Tramp Orchestra will premiere Moviola, my score to the public domain silent film Too Much Johnson, to film on 22 July as part of the Wintergreen Music Festival. Popcorn, mountain air, dusk falling as the orchestra tunes up, dogs running in the fields, young children wandering about, and a top-notch chamber orchestra of terrific players playing challenging (but satisfying to play) music joyfully composed to a fascinating and funny silent by one of the greatest filmmakers of all time made in the months before international fame came to surround him: that’s my idea of fun.

More about Too Much Johnson here.

Ouroboros

I don’t remember presenting my music to a roomful of students at a community college on the west coast in December 1990. But I had a note this morning—thirty-two years later—from a young composer who was there. Composer and conductor Troy Peters had played him a cassette recording of Leonard Slatkin and the Saint Louis Symphony reading my orchestra piece Fresh Ayre (which became the first movement of my second symphony—long story) and it had, as the cliché goes, struck a chord with him: “Polychords,” he wrote, “A over E, then E over A, followed by the unadorned octave-doubled major-seventh melodic leap: E, D#, then a near-octatonic hexachord I couldn't justify using any of the scale types my freshman-level instruction had provided.”

I remembered bringing it into a lesson with Joe Schwantner at Juilliard in fall 1986. He took the time to figure out the hexachords. “May I take this page home with me this week? I’d like to study it,” he said. I was floored. The next week he brought with him an array of numbers that told the theoretical story of what I had done during those first ten bars that humbled and dazzled me and changed my life. Ensued an exciting discussion of Schoenberg’s signature hexachord, and a fascinating ramble through the first few pages of Joe’s own Aftertones of Infinity.

Four years after Joe had changed my life, I had paid it forward without knowing it for the young composer in Washington. Matthew 7:6 came to mind. Thirty-six years later, I remain moved by the profound act of faith (in teaching, in Art, in the aesthetic, and on and on) that Joe demonstrated in casting pearls before me. 

Accepting one’s role in the transitivity of teaching is both humbling and exhilarating. If one fetishizes the pearls one casts, as Oscar Levant quipped, teaching can devolve into “revealing openly known secrets.” If one doesn’t underline—if only a bit—the importance of the thing being taught, then one trivializes not just one’s role, but the tradition itself. 

But what are the “pearls” being cast? Are they “artistic truths?” Whose truth? What kind is it? Small or large T? Objective? Normative? Subjective? Complex? Plato argued that fine art and poetry cannot impart truths because they do not give humankind access to the Forms. On the other hand, Aristotle defended poetry as a means of obtaining general knowledge about probable courses of human events. Picasso knew a thing or two about Art. He is supposed to have said that “art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.” The other day I watched Orson Welles’ witty documentary F for Fake and was grateful all over again for his reminder that “our songs will all be silenced, but what of it?” His answer (the one with which I agree, if you take my operafilm Orson Rehearsed at its word) is to “go on singing.” Go on casting pearls.

“I share this with you with no expectation of a response,” wrote the man, now a respected colleague in mid-career. “I believe it's important to let those who've changed us for the better know of the role they played.”

I tried, in Orson Rehearsed, to capture, as one generous and perceptive colleague observed about it, “the hallucinatory parabola of [an] almost mythological creature.” In truth, with a wink to the maestro, I know that I succeeded in creating something that gives back to the person viewing / hearing it exactly what they expected: surface beauty, if what they wanted to feel was clever at the creator’s expense. It is a work that grows deeper with repeated listenings / viewings. What’s required in accessing Orson Rehearsed, ironically, is faith—faith that the artist and his subject might have something more to say beneath the self-awareness that Art is, in most ways, a magic trick—a work about just that; a work about Process, about singing, about dying.

“This is simply an amusing anecdote,” concluded the modest note—the note that expected no response. Quite rightly: one should teach without the expectation that the process of paying it forward shall have been anything except the point. One teaches as an act of faith—faith in the “dead artists out of the living past,” and the expectation that the aesthetic provides not just entertainment and solace but something (whether we capitalize it or not) more than the bromide that “life is art and art is life.” Somehow, Art “changes us for the better.” 

I am grateful for the letter. I feel blessed to have been reminded of the Ouroboros that is Art (and, by extension, the teaching of art) by a message from a colleague that completes / concludes an orbit of over three decades. That’s the way that things end; but it is also how they begin again. Pass it on.

Other, More Important, Things

I recalled, very early one morning, Father's last words to me, now over twenty years ago: "I probably should have gotten psychological help when you were boys, but there always seemed to be other, more important, things.” 

I wasn’t surprised the day in 2001 that a New Berlin police officer called to tell me that “we found your dad several days ago. He had been … um … deceased for a couple of days and … there was no indication of next of kin. So, um … we had to track you down … over the Internet. Nice website, by the way.” Father’s decomposing body had lain for several days before being discovered by a cop face down in his own dried vomit on the floor of the den in our Big Cedar House. The immediate cause was “arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease,” but, when I called the coroner for an explanation, he explained, without emotion, “Well, he was clearly an untreated diabetic, and the liver was cirrhotic, so there’s that.”

He had been failing for some time. I imagine that, since he was only slowing down, Father didn't see the point in paying a doctor to tell him to change his life. Father’s emotions were volcanic. His thirst for expressions of love was impossible to slake. No gesture was enough, so his feelings were always hurt. During our conversation, immediately after Mother’s death, he tried to explain himself to me by quoting the toast from Citizen Kane: “A toast, Jedediah, to love on my terms. Those are the only terms anybody ever knows—his own.”

My brothers had promised their mother to keep trying to communicate with him, but it was naïve of her to expect them to just let go of the damage that a father can do to his son. Shortly after her death, each had an encounter with him that forced them to decide whether to carry on, or to make a new start, with him by telling him that he was forgiven—not that he particularly desired forgiveness, or felt that he deserved it, or understood the suffering and shame he’d inflicted on them with his actions, judgments, and words. The “unveiled secrets of their father,” neither ever spoke to him again.

Partly because I rarely fought him, he never attacked me the way that he did them, so I remained—to a consciously calibrated degree—sensitive to the wounded love that motivated his anger. I never felt the need for an apology from him, or to offer him forgiveness. I accepted that he loved me, had done the best that he could, and that he was sick. To the end, being right remained more important to him than being happy. He taught me how to work; but is wife taught me how to love working.  In the end, I kept in touch with him because I promised her that I would, and because not doing so would have made me feel guilty, and I didn’t have what it took to accept that burden. We spoke on the phone. To avoid emotional manipulation, I’d hang up when he turned ugly. Conversations could be short.

It was with a weird sort of relief that my brother and I flew to Milwaukee to perform together the mundane tasks sons do for their dead fathers—burying him, gathering up whatever was worth saving in the house and readying it for sale. In the garage sat the last in a long line of used cars and a lot of familiar, rusting gardening equipment. When we managed to get into the house, it was like a visit with Dickens’ Miss Havisham. Enormous, ropy, decade-old webs hung from the soaring ceiling of the front room, in which buckets sat everywhere on sheets of plastic to catch the rain which had been working its way through the roof for years and in which cheap, remaindered furniture added after Mother's death cluttered the once elegant space. The kitchen whose floor we had scrubbed in our pajamas in the small hours as boys hadn't been used for anything except boiling noodles for what seemed a very long time. The pantry was empty. He had obviously been bathing in the sink. Between the kitchen and the library was an enormous, half-filled garbage can, which looked as though it had been placed there for our use in cleaning up after his demise. The third floor was deserted, the master bedroom with the huge bed at the foot of which Mother died was half-made, the sheet half-pulled off. It looked (and felt) like a crime scene. Once she had banished him, sometime in my early teens, he had never again slept there; he slept on a couch in the den, where he had clearly been living for years….

Father had converted what had been my bedroom into a sort of storage room for teddy bears of various shapes and sizes, which he at some point had taken to giving out to strangers and acquaintances alike. There were dozens of them. The den, where he collapsed and died, was like the lair of some wounded animal. Stinking slightly of sweat, it was filled with broken electronic equipment, an empty Cutty Sark bottle on its side, and a single box filled with insurance papers. On a table sat a box containing what little he had elected to save of his and our family's history—letters, newspaper clippings, birth certificates, and a handful of faded photographs. He returned all my letters to me, tucked carefully back into the envelopes in which they had been sent. Like my other brother a few years before, who emptied his Springfield hotel room before taking a taxi to the hospital one last time, Father was determined to leave no Rosebuds sitting around for others to pick over. Nevertheless, it took us several days to cart away the garbage and the alarming number of broken vacuum cleaners and microwave ovens he had somehow accumulated, to knock the place into the barest shape before handing it over to a realtor who would then sell it after our departure “as is.”

Except for the books that he and Mother had acquired together in college, Father had thrown out or given away all his books and papers. How sad those books that remained looked, propped at crazy angles, cigarette-smoke-stained, moldy, some lolling open over the lip of the shelf like tongues. I fished a copy of Leaves of Grass from the shelf and paged through it. Their marginalia, the handwriting so personal, so recognizable, was a testament to the seriousness with which they pursued their dialogue with favorite poets. It was possible to read their hearts and minds flowering for the first time. He wrote in the margin on one side of a page of Keats’ On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer, “Man cannot possess perpetual happiness; only momentary glimpses in intimation of beauty.” On the other side of the page, she answered, “Note how he makes nouns of adjectives & vice versa.” Further down the page, he wrote, “Every poet is contributing to a great poem; each poet is holding ground in his way—,” to which she replied, with two brisk down-strokes of her pen beside Keats’ lines, “Of course, this is the function of a poet’s role.” Really, it’s a love duet they’re singing, with Keats’ observations about Homer as the subtext. Beautiful. Keats had always been Father’s solace, and John Milton; Mother loved Browning, and Baudelaire. A volume of Baudelaire, with Mother’s corrections to the French translation interlaced with the published text, had a bookplate that read, “This book is the property of Gwen Johnson.” They continued to sing together after marrying: Father picked up an anthology of British and American poetry during the 60s the bookplate of which read, “Ex Libris Gwen and Earl Hagen—darling I knew you had to have this—Earl.” A copy of Dylan Thomas’ collected poems was inscribed by me, aged 13 in blue ballpoint pen, “For Mama—a gift from your children, Christmas, 1974.” I took all the volumes that remained. They now rest safely between their siblings on the shelves in the Big Victorian House, where they will snuggle safely for the rest of my life, thereafter to be handed on to my sons for safekeeping, my parents’ marginalia and those added by me read by them as though they were eavesdropping on our ghostly songs.

Mother's recipe box I rescued from the top shelf in the kitchen pantry and gave to my brother, who handed it down to his son. Finally, I caught the kitten; my brother's wife adopted it. We dealt with the realtor, the funeral home, and the local newspaper. Writing the obituary, I couldn’t remember the names of his siblings, or any facts about his life…. We had the remains cremated. There was the melancholy triage of Executorship. I arranged a memorial, to which neither of us went. Sometime later, a well-meaning relative sent a videotape of the service on which numerous familiar-looking people I have never met shared sad, kindly reminiscences of a man I never knew. When I told Father that “all we ever wanted was for you to be happy with us,” his last words to me, in January 2001, a few weeks before he died, were, “I probably should have gotten psychological help when you were boys, but there always seemed to be other, more important, things.” 

This essay appeared in its original form in the Huffington Post. Click here to read it there.